The blog tour for Stephen Anastasi starts today. His two books The Druid, the first book in The Land of the Rainbow’d Sun series, and The Runes of Ire, first book in the series Mathemagicians of Yore, were released this month and his following is growing daily. Even though these books are fantasy stories for children, Stephen’s writing style and subject is quite diverse. I delved deeply into the mind of this prolific author to find the answers to the questions I was sure you would like to ask.

Over the next ten days, you will learn much about this fascinating author and discover the reason I decided to invest in his books. Below you will find the tour spots and dates. Please share his tour; you will learn something new each day.

We’ll start today with a few questions on the book The Druid and his journey to publication. Describe your book ‘The Druid’ in five words or less.Girl saves the world.

How did the ideas for this book come to you?After I wrote my first novel – The Runes of Ire – the question came to me, ‘How come the people of this world speak a kind of English? I don’t like it when all the aliens mysteriously speak English. The answer is that the first person to come to this place was from a place that has some variety of English as the Mother tongue. This meant I had a girl tending sheep in that English speaking world, and worrying about Swarthymen and Mystals.Why did you choose to write in the fantasy genre?I write in several genres – fantasy, future fiction (like Michael Crichton) but I liked The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I guess this book is somewhere in the middle.Did you have to do much research for this book? I read up about Druids, but knowledge of their practices a long time ago is fairly scant, so pretty much anything goes.Can you tell me about the main character, and what you like/dislike about her?Titian is a very sincere person who feels things very deeply, yet has a great inner strength. Only once does she doubt herself.Is there something that sets this book apart from others?Several readers have noted that this book has an odd characteristic –the story seems to get quieter and quieter, until you feel like you are in a vast, empty room. It’s almost like falling through space.Did you have the manuscripts professionally edited before they went to the publisher?No, but I took on board the advice of many people in the industry as I wrote the books. I learned some good advice from an agent. She said – ‘Show, don’t tell!’I learned some good advice from Stephen King. He said – ‘Ditch the adverbs!’I gained some good experience from writing screenplays and learned – ‘Just tell the story!’ If you take this on board, it means you have to write sparsely – maximum story in minimum words. If you do this, there isn’t much left to edit.

Did you submit your manuscripts to many publishers before you had an offer to publish?Only three publishers, but then I just sat and stared at the manuscript. It’s not the rejection, just the emptiness of enquiry.The big two liked them very much ... but. The manuscript for The Druid was shortlisted for a Varuna Award, strong evidence that the writing was fine.

Do you have any tips for writers about the writing process or the path to publishing?Show, don’t tell! Ditch the adverbs – use ‘power verbs’. Just tell the story – in a modern world of bites, long winded is a death sigh. Dropping the verbose adds air and light, and turns verbal heartburn into prose. Never give up on your dream.

What's next for you? Are you currently working on or have plans for future projects? As well as the next two books in the series Mathemagicians of Yore, and The Land of the Rainbow’d Sun, I am also presently working on several other novels – Carlisle’s Mind, a Crichtonesque future fiction which explores the rise to sentience of a computer, and its way of sorting out the problem of humans, and also ‘The Brotherhood of the Apocalypse’ a chiller that also looks at an endpoint scenario for the problem of humans. And a book that will cause great cntroversy – my theory of evolution – a theory not supported by the many other books on the subject.

The Runes of Ire and The Druid are available from your local bookshop. They may not be in stock, but the store can order it through distributor Dennis Jones and Associates. They are also available in many on-line stores as a paperback and as an eBook. Signed copies can be purchased from http://morrispublishingaustralia.com. You can win a signed copy of either book in a competition we are running as a part of this promotional tour. One of each book is up for grabs. To go in the draw, simply go to the website by the link above and on the contact page form write: Stephen’s competition, your name, email address, and your book preference.

If you are on the Gold Coast this weekend, pop into Supa Nova and say hello to author Stephen Anastasi. For all his confidence that his books are great, he is new to ‘putting himself out there’, so take pity on him and seek him out to say hello. He will be very grateful. You will find him amongst the many exhibitors there, maybe looking a little lost in the crowd. Read on to learn more about this interesting and quirky debut author.

When I first met Stephen Anastasi at a library event last year, I was a little taken aback at his confidence in his writing. No shrinking violet, Stephen told me how great his stories were and how much I would love them. At that stage, they were published only as eBooks. Having met many writers, I had deduced that the ones who most loved and boasted about their writing were mostly wrong. Being an amateur psychologist, I decided that they boasted to cover a feeling of uncertainty – a position of, ‘if I tell everyone how wonderful they are, it will somehow make it so’. The best writing I had seen came from the ones who were quietly confident that their books were okay. But when I sat down to read Stephen’s book the Druid, I changed my mind. He was right, they are wonderful and I did indeed enjoy the books. His writing style is a little quirky and he has a tendency to make up words if he can’t find one that suits (as did many famous writers, like Shakespeare, he constantly reminds me), but his writing is tight and entertaining and the stories are woven from an amazing imagination.

When I learnt what he did for a living, one obvious question came to mind; how did a teacher of mathematics and physics come to write, and in particular, write fantasy stories for children? Stephen told me, “In 1992 I bought a computer and learned to touch type. At that time I had what some authors call a ‘High concept’. This was,‘What if they could put a kind of superconductive hair net over your brain so that you could be seamlessly connected to a computer? Is the limit of human evolution still human?’ When I started writing this I story, I soon realized that this was going to be a quarter of a million words. That seemed impossible to me then. So I wrote it into a twenty thousand word screenplay. That was my first foray into writing.”

This is more the kind of writing I would expect from Stephen. So I persisted and asked how his first book, The Runes of Ire come to be. He said, “One day I met a man whose name was Garney Barnicoat. To me, the name Garney Barnicoat sounds like an adventure. When I heard the name, I said to someone, ‘What a ripper name. You could write a book with a title like that…how about, ‘Garney Barnicoat goes South,’ or ‘Garney Barnicoat goes to Africa, or, ‘Garney Barnicoat and the Runes of Ire. Hey, what would that be about?’ I sat down and wrote the story. Now I know.”

I asked Stephen if he did any research for the story he said, “My background is in physics and mathematics. Knowing the rules that govern the universe makes it easier to know how far the rules can be bent. I try not to break them (all evidence to the contrary in the book). Reality is; all I did was allow one of the world’s fundamental constants – Planck’s constant – to be much larger than it is in our universe. Then I dropped an unsuspecting twelve-year-old into that world and watched him swim.”

He says, “I write because it seems to be the only way in which I can walk other people through the unusual architecture of my labyrinthine mind. He says, ‘I like to think that, like Jack London, or Harper Lee, when I’m gone, people will smile, or cry, or feel something special because of something I wrote.”Stephen has released two books at the same time, a concept that is very unusual - especially as they are both the first books in two different series. On this subject he told me, “The Runes of Ire was the first of these two books completed. After I read it again, I realised that there was a back story to how the 4 ½ dimension world our hero Garney Barnicoat finds himself in was discovered, so I set out to tell that story in The Druid. Even though these books are the first in two different series, it seemed appropriate to release them together.”

The Druid was shortlisted for a Varuna Award – one of Australia’s most prestigious award for emerging writers.

He regularly slips out of his writing space and falls into a world where there are teachers and students of science and mathematics. There, he does his best to make students believe that to a sufficiently advanced mind, physics, mathematics and magic are nearly indistinguishable. Stephen says, “Occasionally a student gets it—sees the greater reality—and goes electric withunderstanding. I like to think that these students will carry a torch to others.”

The author has had a short story published; a true story of a man lost at sea who had to swim many kilometres home. But mostly, he likes to write about thequirky side of life—funny, scary, odd; for example his other stories are; thetrue secret world of a cemetery manager (A Tale from the Crypt), the life of arat dog trainer (Rat Dogs), the rise to sentience of a supercomputer(Carlisle’s Mind), the world of a man who is never allowed to die because heknows too much (A Note from 23C), and the endpoint solution when the world is faced with an Easter Island scenario (The Brotherhood of the Apocalypse). He is also working on a book that will cause great controversy – his theory of evolution – a theory not supported by the many other books on the subject.

These books are only the beginning for Stephen Anastasi. That he will become well known author is a given. You will hear much more of him in the future.